The thing about Ross is - he's just very funny

I BLAME the credit crunch. Only terminal weariness with hearing about our ever-worse economic prospects can explain why Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross dominated the news all week.

All their crimes amounted to was a pair of dirty little boys ringing some old-timer's front door bell, shouting "Poo! Belly! Bum!" and then trying to run off before they got slapped.

Brand and Ross nearly made it, too. After the programme was originally broadcast on Radio 2, only two listeners complained to the BBC, one of whom was the victim, Andrew Sachs. Who can the other possibly have been? Mary Whitehouse is dead. But after a week of furious coverage, thousands have now registered their indignation, or as it might be, inflamed priggishness.

Yet Jonathan Ross has often made me laugh. For let's admit it: he's really good at what he does.

A couple of years ago, I was surprised to find that a Radio Times poll of people working in radio, asking them to name their favourite and most influential broadcaster, had put Ross first, ahead of the likes of Humphrys and Wogan. So I started listening to his Saturday morning show and soon realised why.

He's peculiarly engaging as a broadcaster because you know that, whenever he sets off on a subject, he is winging it, more or less unprepared. But what he comes up with is then always surprisingly resourceful and inventive, going a little bit further than you could have anticipated, both verbally and in bad taste.

It works equally well whether he's doing it on air or with a guest and a live audience on television. Every time, it's a real performance, with all the excitement of watching any act that constantly risks failure, like walking a tightrope or singing an aria.

The drama doesn't work quite so well when solidified into print. His new book Why Do I Say These Things? isn't really written at all, just ramblings on tape that have been put on paper. Not much of a book, maybe. But you can still hear his voice lifting off the page - and many of these riffs, on such deplorable subjects as genital warts and castrating his dog, have made me laugh out loud, quite against my will, of course. And we warm to people who make us laugh.

Ross does get paid a lot, £6 million a year, but I don't mind that. I'm always heartened that somebody can garner such loot for mere verbal adroitness, rather than plundering Russia's natural resources, being born the Duke of Westminster, or destroying our savings. Maybe it's too much but then he has talent unlike the executives who have now suspended him for 12 weeks.

McEwan parodies himself

IAN McEwan says he always felt there was a mismatch in opera between the sublime music and the absurd plots. So when he came to write a libretto for Michael Berkeley's For You, about a libidinous composer, premiered this week, he aimed at a new "fictional realism". Perhaps For You works well enough on stage. However, it has also been published as a paperback and though I very much admire McEwan's fiction, For You reads like nothing so much as a brisk and efficient parody of one of his own novels — openly telling you all the time what everybody's thinking and feeling, over-schematised, over-tidy and over-explicit. I don't think that can have been quite the effect intended.

Our new temple of delight

YESTERDAY, the first shoppers into the new Westfield centre didn't just look curious or acquisitive. A lot of them looked positively enraptured, as if they'd seen their God.

It is an enormous and impressive place, expensively finished, glamorously lit from above, boasting a startling array of shops and restaurants. But it's about much more than just buying and selling. Westfield is, in its own way, a devotional edifice, a temple to consumerism. Just as the cathedrals were the highest expression of their times, and the great stations the triumph of the railway age, so such a lavish mall sums up our current idea of glory. It is shopping purified, shopping removed from all that is not shopping, shopping presented as the great end of life.

For many of those excitedly discovering it yesterday, it seemed to be paradise. It reminded me of George A Romero's great film Dawn of the Dead in which zombies congregate in a mall, swaying gently to the Muzak, because it is the place they remember best.